Guest post by Yulia Lapynina.
Businesses spend significant sums on channels like SEO, paid advertising, and social media to drive traffic to their websites. But too often, they fail to think through the next step: how to optimally engage prospects once they land on the company’s home page.
Some prefer to stay silent and waiting for customers to act; others choose to initiate the conversation first with the help of chat triggers that activate a chat box widget after some defined period of time or specific action. These approaches are referred to as reactive and proactive chat, correspondingly.
Each method of communicating with customers has advantages and drawbacks. But statistics show that proactive communication is much more beneficial, as it’s preferred by 79% of clients who often use online services. It presents the image of a caring company that’s always ready to help in the moment of need.
How to Improve the Communication Between Website and Visitor
Although comprehensive customer experience platforms that can initiate chats with new website visitors improve engagement, only 13% of sites use a proactive strategy, starting the conversation before the visitors asks for help. To switch from reactive communication to proactive, you can use tools such as:
- Scripted chat triggers: If set correctly, they will display a message at just the right time in the chat widget encouraging the visitor to start a conversation. When defining triggers, it is important to balance concern about the customer’s needs with an unwanted and annoying interruption.
- Omnichannel customer support: By involving different teams in preparing chat agents, you can cover all possible situations and handle a wide variety of issues through branching to different areas including product sales, tech support, website-related questions, and other topics.
- Live chat canned responses: Answers to common questions can help chat agents efficiently manage conversions with several customers at once. A drawback is that these types of answer are only helpful during the first stages of communication, and aren’t applicable in every use case.
- Integration with social networks: Adding connections to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other platforms to customer service software can enlarge the audience and attract more users to purchase the product or service offered.
Applying these features to your website chat widget makes it possible to create efficient proactive chat functionality that will engage website visitors and increase conversions and sales.
How Your Chat Greeting can Increase Conversions
Choosing the right greeting can positively impact visitor response. It should be polite but not excessively formal or artificial, friendly and authentic but not too personal – there should always remain a certain distance combined with a reasonable amount of respect.
Carefully crafting the right words for your greeting can yield a positive response from 75% or more of your new site visitors.
How to Use One Live Chat for Different Channels
It’s easy to find a live chat app that integrates well with not only your website, but also most popular social networks, and can promote your products effectively to targeted audiences. In order to connect such apps to your core customer experience platform, you need to complete only a few simple actions:
- Log in into your live chat provider system.
- Choose the option for establishing connection between the service and other social networks.
- Authorize your business accounts and make sure it works properly.
With this feature, you’ll be able to collect all messages in one platform and work with them the same way as with regular notifications from your website: apply your standard responses, assign the chat to the applicable group (your customer service department, sales team, billing, etc.), and track your platform’s analytics.
How to Choose the Best B2B Live Chat Software
Each type of communication has its own requirements of the software and opportunities for live chat. Whether your website is focused on ecommerce, B2B sales, or something else, your online chat capability needs to be fast, flexible, and able to track and report on detailed analytics. And that’s just the beginning of the requirements your users across different departments will have.
Benefits of Live Chat Software for Business
Proactive chat, done right, can make your company appear welcoming, concerned about the needs of your website visitors, and helpful. When site visitors see that there is a real person available to chat with—not merely an automated bot—it increases their level of trust in your company, encouraging them to come back for more.
Keep in mind that only 33% (optimistically) of visitors will give a website a second chance if their first visit was disappointing. It’s vital to make your site as welcome, engaging, and intuitive as possible, regardless of how unique your products or services may be.
Yulia Lapynina is a market research executive.
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